Hope and Change in an Alabama Coal Mine – by Elaina Plott (The Atlantic – July 31, 2018)

Buoyed by President Trump’s support for the industry, a veteran miner is putting his cash on the line and reopening his business.

BESSEMER, Ala.—It was hulking, it was orange, and its name was Trump. Randy Johnson looked on as his new 220-ton excavator carved up the ground, clearing the field of rocks to help unearth the coal underneath. Four weeks earlier, the central Alabama mine’s 22 employees had gathered to christen the $2.7 million purchase, painting “TRUMP” in white block letters along the excavator’s side.

The day I visited, a recent Friday in July, those letters gleamed under the punishing southern sun, the machine’s every move—every swivel at the base, every curl of the claw—an implicit tribute to the 45th president.

It’s tradition in the mining industry to name the “big machines.” Apart from the land itself, they represent the bulk of capital for a new site. For Johnson, though, this excavator was emblematic of much more. The 71-year-old Alabama native and mining veteran had bowed out of the industry in 2014, when he says the Obama administration’s “war on coal” pummeled the market.

But with Donald Trump’s election came a wave of “optimism,” he told me: optimism that the crush of regulations would ebb, that the “dirty” caricatures of the industry, aggravated by Barack Obama, would start to soften.

So at the turn of the year, when he learned of an idle reserve in Bessemer, Johnson reopened his company, called one of his old foremen, and made the largest investment of his career. That Friday morning, the mine’s 491 acres hummed. Trump (the excavator), two track hoes, and eight dump trucks were at work on the land’s first seam—or layer—of largely steam coal. “We’re starting small,” Johnson told me.